Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) is his broadest, angriest, and most prophetic novel — written in disgust at the commercial dishonesty he found on returning to England, and now widely considered his masterpiece.

At its centre is Augustus Melmotte, a financier of obscure and possibly criminal origins who arrives in London trailing rumours of vast wealth. Nobody knows where his money came from, or whether it exists at all — but he spends on a scale that silences doubt, and a society hungry for his dinners and his daughter's dowry decides not to ask. His great scheme is the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a venture floated on paper that no one expects to build, designed not to lay track but to inflate shares. As Melmotte rises — feted, courted, put up for Parliament — the speculation balloons on nothing but the confidence of the people he has dazzled.

Around this central swindle Trollope braids a crowded social comedy: the heiress Marie Melmotte and the worthless baronet who courts her money; Lady Carbury, scrabbling for a living by flattering editors to push her shoddy books; the idle lords who sell their names to the railway board; the honest squire who loves in vain. Then the confidence cracks, and the whole glittering edifice comes down with terrible speed. Beneath the comedy lies a sustained study of money corrupting every institution it touches — the aristocracy, Parliament, the press, and love itself — and a verdict, in the deliberate present tense of its title, that has never gone out of date.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1875 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.